1. Field of the Invention
The invention described herein relates to imaging and object tracking.
2. Background Art
Acquiring and tracking a moving object can be aided by automated processing to improve speed and accuracy. Such processing may include technology that includes computer vision. Computer vision algorithms generally exploit shape and/or appearance features for automated analysis of images and video.
Appearance-based methods are challenged by the changes in an object's appearance. The changes may be due to several factors. These may include a) different illumination sources and conditions, b) variations of the object's orientation with respect to the illumination source and camera, and c) different reflectance properties of objects in the scene. Such variability compromises the performance of many vision systems, including background subtraction methods for motion detection, appearance-based trackers, face recognition algorithms, and change detection.
What are needed, therefore, are systems and methods that provide for the acquisition and tracking of an object where the tracking can be maintained even if changes occur in the illumination sources, object orientation, and appearances of other objects in a scene, or if tracking is momentarily lost.